DoD Buzz: Arm Afghan Tribes, Experts Say

[unhappycamper]

Arm Afghan Tribes, Experts Say
By Greg Grant Friday, October 30th, 2009 1:59 pm
Posted in International, Policy

A number of experts think the U.S. should abandon its “top down” strategy of building an Afghan national army and should switch to arming and paying local tribes to fight the Taliban.

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, appearing Thursday at a Capitol Hill conference sponsored by RAND, said he closely examined former Soviet counterinsurgencies in Poland and the Ukraine. In both cases, the Soviets successfully levered small, locally recruited militia forces to successfully battle numerically superior anti-regime insurgents. He warned of the perils of trying to police xenophobic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Pahstuns with an Afghan national army. A better approach is to create and support local militia groups built from country’s various tribes.

RAND’s Arturo Munoz, a former CIA officer stationed in Afghanistan, also backed a “bottom up” counterinsurgency approach that pays and arms the tribes and enlists them to fight alongside U.S. and NATO troops. The Taliban shadow government at the village level is expanding, he warned, the tribes themselves are best suited to beat back that expansion, not foreign troops. The tribes must see tangible benefits, though, in other words, they want money. “If we can’t get the Afghan tribes to fight on our side we shouldn’t be there.”

Brian Jenkins, a former Green Beret who served in Vietnam, now a RAND analyst, is also a big fan of arming the tribes. Ultimately, a large deployment of foreign troops in Afghanistan will be counterproductive and is not sustainable; better to pay and build-up tribal irregular forces, he said. “We can learn from our experience in Vietnam where 2,000 Americans (Special Forces and CIA paramilitary) recruited and managed a force of 50,000 fighters, drawn mostly from the mountain tribes, many of whom were former Viet Cong guerrillas. They were very effective because they were fighting on their own turf.”

Of course no Washington conference on Afghanistan is complete without a debate on the competing merits of the counterinsurgency versus counterterrorism approach.


Rest of article at: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/10/30/arm-afghan-tribes-say-experts/?wh=wh

[Tim01]

1. Good plan. What could possibly go wrong?

*sarcasm*

[unhappycamper]

2. Ask the Hmong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmong_people

Laos
The "Secret War"
Main article: Laotian Civil War


In the early 1960s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Special Activities Division began to recruit, train and lead the indigenous Hmong people in Laos to join fighting the Vietnam War, named as a Special Guerrilla Unit led by General Vang Pao. About 60% of the Hmong men in Laos were supported by the CIA to join fighting for the "Secret War" in Laos.<27> <28> The CIA used the Special Guerrilla Unit as the counter attack unit to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main military supply route from the north to the south. Hmong soldiers put their lives at risk in the frontline fighting for the United States to block the supply line and to rescue downed American pilots. In 1967-1971, 3,772 Hmong soldiers were killed in the frontline, 5,426 were injured and disabled.<29> In 1962-1975, about 12,000 Hmong died fighting against Pathet Lao.<30>

General Vang Pao led the Region II (MR2) defense against NVA incursion from his headquarters in Long Cheng, also known as Lima Site 20 Alternate (LS 20A).<31> At the height of its activity, Long Cheng became the second largest city in Laos. Long Cheng was a micro-nation operational site with its own bank, airport, school system, officials, and many other facilities and services in addition to its military units. Before the end of the Secret War, Long Cheng would fall in and out of General Vang Pao's control.

The Secret War began around the time that the U.S. became officially involved in the Vietnam War. Following the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, the Lao kingdom was overthrown by the communists and the Hmong people became targets of retaliation and persecution. While some Hmong people returned to their villages and attempted to resume life under the new regime, thousands more made the trek to and across the Mekong River into Thailand, often under attack. This marked the beginning of a mass exodus of Hmong people from Laos. Those who did make it to Thailand generally were held in squalid United Nations refugee camps. Nearly 20 years later, in the 1990s, a major international debate ensued over whether the Hmong should be returned to Laos, where opponents of their return argued they were being subjected to persecution, or afforded the right to emigrate to the U.S. and other Western nations.

Hmong Lao resistance

Of those Hmong who did not flee Laos, somewhere between two and three thousand were sent to re-education camps where political prisoners served terms of 3-5 years. Many Hmong died in these camps, after being subjected to hard physical labor and harsh conditions.<32> Thousands more Hmong people, mainly former soldiers and their families, escaped to remote mountain regions - particularly Phou Bia, the highest (and thus least accessible) mountain peak in Laos. Initially, some Hmong groups staged attacks against Pathet Lao and Vietnamese troops while others remained in hiding to avoid military retaliation and persecution. Spiritual leader Zong Zoua Her rallied his followers in a guerrilla resistance movement called Chao Fa (RPA: Cauj Fab). Initial military successes by these small bands led to military counter-attacks by government forces, including aerial bombing and heavy artillery, as well as the use of defoliants and chemical weapons.<33>

Small groups of Hmong people, many of them second or third generation descendants of former CIA soldiers, remain internally displaced in remote parts of Laos, in fear of government reprisals. Faced with continuing military operations against them by the government and a scarcity of food, some groups have begun coming out of hiding, while others have sought asylum in Thailand and other countries.<34>

Throughout the Vietnam War, and for two decades following it, the U.S. government stated that there was no "Secret War" in Laos and that the U.S. was not engaged in air or ground combat operations in Laos. In the late 1990s, however, several U.S. conservatives, alleging that the Clinton administration was using the denial of this covert war to justify a repatriation of Thailand-based Hmong war veterans to Laos, urged the U.S. government to acknowledge the existence of the Secret War and to honor the Hmong and U.S. veterans from the war. On May 15, 1997, in a total reversal of U.S. policy, the U.S. government acknowledged that it had supported a prolonged air and ground campaign against the NVA and VietCong. It simultaneously dedicated the Laos Memorial on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery in honor of the Hmong and other combat veterans from the Secret War.

[Tim01]

3. When it comes to he Mid East I loose track of who we have armed vs who is shooting at us.

We keep arming people on Monday and fighting with them on Thursday.

[xchrom]

4. everyone who has arms to sell sold to the middle east.

france, usa, germany. england, italy -- you know russia -- and i'll bet china is in the game now.

it's a treasured tradition.

[xchrom]

5. isn't that sort of how we 'made' the taliban? nt

[thunder rising]

6. Use strategies from Vietnam--expect the same outcome. As I recall, overall we didn't do so well.

This is a strategy where we (US) wedge the indigenous tribes against each other. It doesn't matter who dies as long as they kill each other. Then when the population is sufficiently reduced we can step in. It's a way of avoiding the responsibilities of atrocity and genocide.